If modern society can get past
selling daughters for cows, surely we can decide to write modern C code in
an "application" that is probably 3 lines of shell/python/cgi away from
talking to the internet in a lot of places..

Remove support for big-endian i386 and amd64.
Before someone suggests the OpenSSL people are junkies, here is what they
mention about this:
/* Most will argue that x86_64 is always little-endian. Well,
* yes, but then we have stratus.com who has modified gcc to
* "emulate" big-endian on x86. Is there evidence that they
* [or somebody else] won't do same for x86_64? Naturally no.
* And this line is waiting ready for that brave soul:-) */
So, yes, they are on drugs. But they are not alone, the stratus.com people are,
too.

spray the apps directory with anti-VMS napalm.
so that its lovecraftian horror is not forever lost, i reproduce below
a comment from the deleted code.
/* 2011-03-22 SMS.
* If we have 32-bit pointers everywhere, then we're safe, and
* we bypass this mess, as on non-VMS systems. (See ARGV,
* above.)
* Problem 1: Compaq/HP C before V7.3 always used 32-bit
* pointers for argv[].
* Fix 1: For a 32-bit argv[], when we're using 64-bit pointers
* everywhere else, we always allocate and use a 64-bit
* duplicate of argv[].
* Problem 2: Compaq/HP C V7.3 (Alpha, IA64) before ECO1 failed
* to NULL-terminate a 64-bit argv[]. (As this was written, the
* compiler ECO was available only on IA64.)
* Fix 2: Unless advised not to (VMS_TRUST_ARGV), we test a
* 64-bit argv[argc] for NULL, and, if necessary, use a
* (properly) NULL-terminated (64-bit) duplicate of argv[].
* The same code is used in either case to duplicate argv[].
* Some of these decisions could be handled in preprocessing,
* but the code tends to get even uglier, and the penalty for
* deciding at compile- or run-time is tiny.
*/